Playing the Race Card!

Crazy Johnny! A recently minted white man spouting racist drivel

On Race, Romney and the Republican Party

While MittRomney’s chief surrogate Crazy John Sununu – an effete clueless old fart with an attitude – fires racist innuendos aimed at President Obama, as the election draws near, the Republicans reveal their true character as the party of angry white racist and greedy Wall Street Bankers.

This is a bizarre political formation; a party that defends the interests of the plutocrats while it’s mass base is composed of poor whites. It is the Party of Abraham Lincoln, and was roundly hated by whites but loved by black people, when I was a boy growing up in Florida.

Afro-Americans loved the “Grand Old Party” for the simple reason that they opposed the Dixiecrats – the southern branch of the Democratic Party that was populated by unapologetic white racist who favored maintaining a legal racial caste system based on white supremacy. But in the half century since I quit Florida, the Democrats have become the hated Party of the white majority while the Republicans are flourishing.

This radical transformation of political allegiance was sparked by the critical role Democrats played in passing Civil Rights legislation that destroyed the evil but legal caste system. President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil rights legislation into law, told his Press Secretary Bill Moyers after signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act that radically changed the political landscape of the south, the Democrats would lose the region to the Republicans for a generation. He was right, but it has lasted longer than a generation.

Although the old de-jure racial caste system has been destroyed, and millions of whites would give a year off their lives to be able to hang out with Jay Z and Beyonce or Lebron James, and millions more would jump at the chance to spend an evening with the elegant and brilliant Black First Family in the White House, alas deep-seated racist feelings and resentment over black success linger among poor, working class, and especially elderly whites all over America.

These people long for a world has all but disappeared. And they view the election of Barack Obama to the presidency as irrefutable evidence that the world they grew up in is gone with the wind. That’s why we hear their pathetic and irrational cry about “taking our country back.” The rabid racists who cannot reconcile themselves to this unprecedented development in American politics that put a member of America’s traditionally untouchable caste in the Oval Office, a great leap forward, may number over half the white population.

Since the princes and powers of the Grand Obstructionist Party know they must attract a good percentage of this untutored mob in order to win national elections, they have been increasing hostile, disrespectful and openly racist toward the President, shamelessly employing age old racial stereotypes that are deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of white Americans.

Within the last two days John Sununu, whose status as a white man would have been an iffy proposition in Florida back in the day, has basically called the president a lazy coon who is too stupid to carry out the duties of the Presidency. Rush Limbaugh – the philosopher king of the ignorant, racist, powerless white mob that comprise the Republican base – said yesterday that the President is unqualified because he has never had to earn anything in his life – unlike like Mitt and George Bush for instance.

And former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, a decadent old redneck cracker sophist posing as a political sage, said Barack is not a real President because he doesn’t do what a president is supposed to do.

This is the electoral strategy of the Grand Obstructionists Party, endorsed by the Mormon Bishop who leads them, at the dawning of the 21st century. They have revived the strategy of playing to white racial resentments originally called the “Southern Strategy” that made the Republicans the favored party of the South and put both Nixon and Reagan in the White House.

In 1900 Dr. WEB DuBois predicted the color line would be the central problem of the 20th century and his prediction proved prophetic. More than a hundred years later that line has been largely erased and become somewhat invisible; yet color prejudice remains a problem in the USA, and the Grand Obstructionist Party is making the most of it.